When Fake Holidays Attack!

Mamas, gird your loins! Fake Holiday season is upon us! 

It’s that time of year when teachers go crazy. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as pro-teacher as they come. But somewhere along the way, teachers in the lower grades, and especially preschool and daycare teachers, lost their everloving minds and started inventing holidays. And along with these invented holidays come art projects, class parties, and the dreaded costume requirements.

All my friends in the South who started school in early August are posting adorable pictures of their children dressed as little old people for the 100th day of school. Last week was Groundhog Day, and then it’s a quick dash to Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Dr. Seuss’ birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, and eventually, Field Day, Spirit Week, and some dreaded project requiring your child to dress up like a Colonial person or similar. Oh and also this week is Catholic Schools Week, which means, inexplicably, that tomorrow my children are going to school dressed like tourists. 

Don’t freak out–I know that some of the holidays I listed are real, but my point is, it’s too much! Between now and Memorial Day, my children and yours will engage in at least the following:

1. Making a papercraft groundhog that pops out of a hole. A brad might be involved.
2. Bringing in an empty kleenex box to turn into a Valentine’s card receptacle. Then bringing cards for every kid in the class. Or as has become the trend lately, not bringing cards, but instead spending $100 on mini playdough or stuffed monkeys or whatever nonsense the overachievers saw on Pinterest.
3. Making an Abe Lincoln beard out of cotton balls, and maybe a top hat out of black posterboard.
4. Turning that Abe Lincoln hat into a red-and-white striped Cat in the Hat hat, eating green eggs and ham or other Dr. Seuss-themed food, and reading aloud from a myriad of Dr. Seuss’ books in some sort of attempt at a Guinness record-breaking marathon poetry read.
5. Finding green food coloring or green footprints around the classroom/school, and looking for wherever the naughty leprechaun left the gold.
6. Wearing a period costume, decorating a posterboard, and making a presentation to the class about some historical figure.
7. Figuring out various Spirit Week outfits along the themes of school spirit, the 1980’s, crazy hair/hat, or my personal favorite head-scratcher, salad dressing (9th graders dress like cowboys for ranch, 10th graders dress tropical for thousand island, etc. I think the others were French and Italian. No stereotypes or potential offensive costumes there, am I right?)
8. Buying whatever color t-shirt their class has been assigned for Field Day. 

When did this all happen? When I was in school in the ’80s, we had spirit week and the occasional biography project that required a costume, but other than that, I don’t remember celebrating all these holidays at school. I’m quite certain my mother would have rallied the neighborhood moms to march on the school lawn with picket signs, shouting protest chants.

I’ve written before about how much I hate the Elf on a Shelf, and I feel like the holiday explosion is just the extension of that. I love experiential learning, and I think community fun is vital to the school culture. So, I’m all for the Henry Ford costume I’ll be figuring out later this month for that biography project; and, I’ll happily volunteer to monitor the water balloon toss at Field Day. But all the rest of it is just noise!

So far my kids have not been at a school that does the 100th day of school “dress like a 100-year-old person” thing, but that is where I’m going to draw the line. That “holiday” more than any other feels the most like a social media competition to me. I see absolutely no educational correlation between the elderly and having completed a little more than half the school year. No, this “holiday” feels like an excuse to take silly pictures of your child and post them on Facebook. I have a busy, full life, and wrangling my child into a cardigan and glasses is not on my list of things I’m looking to add to it.

My question is: why are teachers so willing to add this chaos to their lives? Teachers are by and large overworked and underpaid. So is this over-celebration of the inane based on parent feedback? I find that had to believe, given what a headache so much of it is for us. My guess is that someone somewhere had an idea that seemed fun, and it spread. And then without taking anything off the calendar of events, schools kept adding the next trend that seemed fun, and here we are. 

So, this is my plea to stop the madness. Let’s have fun at school in ways that don’t involve parties, costumes, or extra work and stress for the adults on both sides. Let’s take a look at the calendar globally and decide how many celebrations are important culturally or to the community, and let’s get rid of the rest. Saying no is so important, and I think it’s time we start saying no to fake holidays.